


Diaspora

by Idle_Hans



Series: Pocket Universities [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Self-Exile, world-building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:15:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24868207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idle_Hans/pseuds/Idle_Hans
Summary: "We are not your castoffs. We're just the kids who didn't choose you."
Series: Pocket Universities [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1798099
Comments: 7
Kudos: 23





	Diaspora

**Author's Note:**

> The above is a quote from the series [_we must unite inside her walls or we'll crumble from within_](https://archiveofourown.org/series/136245) by [**dirgewithoutmusic**](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic)

Let's talk about the muggleborns who leave.

These are the children who don't get handed a golden key; who don't befriend a famous name, or catch the eye of an eligible scion. The ones who are magical but not brilliant.

These are the children who had their eyes open from the start; who knew themselves to be the outsiders; who realised early that their place in the wizarding world would only ever be the lower rungs. These are the children who know there's a whole world out there; that a life of being a shop assistant or ministry filing clerk is not what they came to this school for.

These are the children who realise that bookshops and the Hogwarts library are the only repositories of magical knowledge they're ever going to have access to. All the rest are in private hands or deep in the Department of Mysteries. So they work quickly, and together. They take turns skipping meals to be in the library when Madam Pince is not watching. They swap tips on how best to copy books, and which tomes are not worth it, or too well protected. They dabble in illicit methods of accessing the Restricted Section. They help each other expand their trunks and smuggle home cubic yards of contraband duplicates at the end of every term.

They're the despair of their teachers, because they know what the teachers pretend not to: that good marks won't gain them anything in years to come, that no-one beyond Hogwarts will ever care if they got an O or a T. Six years out of seven, these children are too busy learning all they can to spare any effort for writing good essays or passing exams. The OWLs to win them wand rights and a further two years at school are the only assessment that matters. A few of them even make a point of catastrophically failing their NEWTs in hopes of being required to repeat. But on the whole, they've got seven years and that's it.

Seven years, then they leave; because these are the children who know they'll always have targets on their backs if they stay. Magical Britain is simply too small for them to stay clear of the classmates who called them names and made a joke of hexing them in the corridors. They've read between the lines of the crime reports in the _Daily Prophet_.

They leave, and once back in the wider world they take themselves to the Ministry of Education and tell a true tale of having gone to a 'progressive' high school with a non-standard curriculum, and they'd like to take some remedial courses, please, because they don't want to be on the dole forever. 

They enter adult life.

They spend weeks at a time contemplating and sorting out all that they crammed into their heads. Both what they learnt in class, and what they taught each other about how to put it to practical use.

They never shop anywhere that requires payment in galleons, not if they can help it. They experiment in brewing essential potions, in saucepans, using ingredients from the garden centre instead of the apothecary. They dabble in crafting protected corners of their living rooms so they can watch telly or listen to the top forty without something shorting out every second week. Occasionally they make discoveries worth publishing — under false names in foreign journals.

Some of them do a few hours of arithmancy or divination on a regular basis, and so derive a trickle of money from the stockmarket, or the national lottery, the casino, or the racetrack. 

But only a trickle. They grew up learning to fly under everyone's radar, and it's a sensible habit by now. And they don't need much to get by.

You might say they lead charmed lives. These are the people who can't walk across a field without treading up an old coin worth a few bob at the pawnbroker's. These are the people who can wear charity shop rags and somehow look more casually elegant than the High Street regulars, yet not stand out. The ones who stumble across abandoned houses in remarkably good condition behind all the weeds, and use adverse possession to live in them lawfully without ruffling feathers. They find rusted wrecks in barns, and drive them for a bit before selling them in showroom condition. They make scads of extraordinarily intricate handmade jewellery to be snapped up by tourists on market day. Their phone numbers (if they have them) are scribbled onto customers' receipts by all the local secondhand dealers because they're known to be a dab hand at cleaning up and restoring just about anything for a small fee.

Their gardens are riots of wildflowers.

Their homes, and wands, are exemplars of detection shielding.

If they keep in touch, they do it by regular post. They never quite trust the Internet. Or owls.

They have affairs with each other's muggle siblings, or one night stands with blokes in pubs.

They think long and hard before daring to have children.


End file.
